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This study examines political media consumption among non-resident citizens, and whether following politics in traditional and social media in their country of residence and origin has a mobilizing effect on voting in origin-country elections. The topic of our study is inspired by the trend towards increased enfranchisement of external citizens, improved methods for participation from abroad, and the transformation of the media landscape with enhanced possibilities for external voters to follow politics in their country of origin. Based on a survey directed towards a stratified random sample of Finnish external citizens in 15 countries, we find that politically oriented media consumption in the country of origin substantially increases the likelihood of participating in origin-country elections and that this effect holds for traditional media channels as well as for social media. A corresponding mobilizing effect is, however, not found for following politics in the country of residence. This demonstrates the value of relevant information for political participation.

In this article, the authors address the presence and societal impact of Romani people in the public spaces of the circus. The focus is on the French circus family Bouglione, originally Sinti from Italy, and their Wild West show performed in France and abroad from 1925 to 1934. As well as forming arenas for cultural transfer, circuses and similar exhibitions made entryways to exotic otherness. The remarkably successful exhibition brought the family both status and wealth, enabling the Bougliones to operate the Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus) in Paris, which continues to enjoy renown for having one of the most prestigious circus venues in the world. The authors’ contribution examines how the Romani family carefully followed social phenomena and used their Wild West show not only to respond to a general interest in exotic exhibits but also to satisfy a contemporary desire for an anti-bourgeois lifestyle. Although the Wild West Show represented a financial undertaking for the Bougliones, it also strengthened the family's societal security.

Finland is traditionally associated with a consensus-like political culture and low partisan hostility. Despite this, concerns about political polarization have become widespread. A possible explanation is that affective polarization, a phenomenon characterized by increasing emotional distances between political groups, is increasing. This article examines trends and individual-level predictors of affective polarization in the Finnish electorate between 2003 and 2019, using survey data from five national election studies. Additionally, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of affective polarization in multiparty settings by introducing a measure based on the absence of neutrality towards parties. This measure focuses on individual-level polarization, thus allowing comparisons between groups of voters. The results show a general increase in affective polarization over the period. Ideological extremity is identified as the main predictor of the phenomenon. Left-right extremity was the strongest predictor at the beginning of the period, whereas GAL-TAN extremity became increasingly important over time. After 2011, the effects of ideological extremity became asymmetrical: extreme left and TAN positions predicted higher levels than their ideological opposites. Feeling close to a party had a mostly consistent effect on affective polarization, albeit not as large as ideological extremity. Increasing affective polarization might undermine the prevailing consensus culture in Finnish politics. However, it might also have positive effects as a corrective to voter apathy, leading to increased participation. This makes Finland an interesting case for further studies of the causes, effects, and dynamics of affective polarization.

Increasingly many citizens residing abroad maintain connections to their country of origin and follow its national elections. Considering that this group constitutes a growing share of the national electorate, it is essential to better understand factors that motivate electoral participation. In this study, we explore the role of economic, social and cultural ties in a unified analysis of turnout among Finnish citizens residing abroad. We rely on individual-level register data that cover the entire Finnish expatriate electorate (n = 96,290) and match their personal background characteristics (e.g. property ownership, length of stay abroad, language) with official turnout from the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections on the bases of personal identification codes. In line with the theoretical expectations, the results provide strong empirical evidence that non-resident citizens who maintain connections to the country of origin are more likely to vote in homeland elections.

The circular economy is a production and consumption model which seeks to use materials and products for as long as possible, whilst keeping waste to a minimum. This study aims to understand the characteristics of the emerging Finnish circular economy marketplace. A network analysis was used on a sample of 41 exemplary cases in Finland, taken from the circular economy business case collection published by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. The coding process led to the identification of 79 nodes and 577 connections between them which are depicted in this study as a network visualisation. Similarities were found between organisation's age and size, with large older organisations and established small and medium sized organisations excelling in optimising product life cycles and reducing overconsumption and new micro sized organisations thriving in managing resource flow and retrieving and recycling materials to put back into the system. Thus, organisations seeking to expand into or transform their operations in line with the circular economy may find the optimal circular economy activity dependent on their size, with large organisations shown to be thriving in repair and redesign activities, small and medium sized organisations in rent and reuse activities and micro sized organisations with retrieve and recycling activities.

Local authorities increasingly employ digital platforms to facilitate public engagement in participatory budgeting processes. This creates opportunities for and challenges in synthesizing citizens’ voices online in an iterated cycle, requiring a systematic tool to monitor democratic quality and produce formative feedback. In this paper, we demonstrate how cases of online deliberation can be compared longitudinally by using six Big Data-based, automated indicators of deliberative quality. Longitudinal comparison is a way of setting a reference point that helps practitioners, designers, and researchers of participatory processes to interpret analytics and evaluative findings in a meaningful way. By comparing the two rounds of OmaStadi, we found that the levels of participation remain low but that the continuity and responsiveness of online deliberation developed positively.

In this article, we argue that the discriminatory acts and laws that the Finnish government issued in the 1930s and 1940s to regulate vagrancy and impose labor obligations on the population were intended first and foremost to put pressure on the Finnish Roma, an ethnic minority consisting of an estimated number of 4,000 persons at that time. Although the irtolaislaki (Finnish Act on the Regulation of Vagrancy) of 1936 did not mention the Roma explicitly, its content and intention is comparable to a series of similar acts directed against them in Europe before and after World War II. These similarities show that Finland's vagrancy legislation cannot be fully understood without a European perspective because Roma policies tend to have a supranational character. Up to now, the historiography on Finland's Roma policies has rarely gone beyond its Finnish and Scandinavian interpretive scope (Gasche 2016, 17–19). Yet, even during WWII, the development in Finland was comparable to some other countries allied with Nazi Germany, as we will show. At the same time, however, the postwar development in Finland seems to be unique in international comparison. Unlike the Finnish Roma, the Roma in Germany and other (West) European countries began a Roma rights movement and started to demand protection within the majority society along with political equality. This activism was primarily based on a consciousness of the centuries-old discrimination against “Gypsies” practiced by the majority, which culminated in the Nazi genocide of Europe's Roma (Matras 1998; Rose 1987; Wippermann 2015, 138–50). The Finnish Roma, however, identified themselves with a positive narrative about Roma soldiers fighting in the Finnish Army for their home country (Ruohotie 2007, 12). This strategy was successful, we argue, since it perfectly fits into the official Finnish narrative about a brave and fair “war of continuation” that Finland fought against the Soviet Union independently and separately from Nazi Germany—a point of view questioned in recent years in light of the information on Finnish Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht volunteers involved in Nazi atrocities against Soviet civilians, including the Roma.

Vote choice in an open-list proportional representation (OLPR) electoral system can be considered a complex process. In systems where votes are cast for individual candidates the choice is complicated by the large number of candidates, the two layers of competition involving both individual candidates and parties, and the amount of information required to make an informed choice. Hence, voters are expected to apply strategies to narrow down the pool of candidates from which the actual choice is made, that is, to create a delimited consideration set using cognitive heuristics. The types of strategies that facilitate voters' candidate choice are studied. More specifically, the voters' perceptions of the ease with which they choose their candidate and how this is related to three decision-making patterns are studied: the party-centric, in which the voter looks for party-related and ideological cues; the socio-normative, in which the voter considers their social in-group; and the candidate-related, in which the voter puts emphasis on specific features of the candidates, such as political experience, age and gender. Our study is situated in the Finnish OLPR system, characterized by many candidates, intense intra-party competition and mandatory preferential voting. Using data from the 2019 Finnish National Election Study and ordinal probit selection models, the mechanisms that facilitate the ease of candidate choice are outlined. Our findings suggest that voters feeling close to a political party and knowing the candidate personally or through friends or family perceive their candidate choice as easier.

Affective polarization refers to people having favorable attitudes toward their preferred political parties, or inparties, along with their supporters, and negative attitudes toward other parties, or outparties, and their supporters. Originally an American concept, there is now growing interest in studying (AP) in European countries characterized by multiparty systems. So far, researchers have primarily focused on like-dislike ratings when measuring affect, which has relegated another important aspect to the background, namely attitudes toward ordinary supporters of parties. Open questions also remain relating to how political ingroups and outgroups should be conceptualized in situations with large numbers of relevant political parties. We examine these puzzles using data from an online panel in Finland. First, we measure partisan social distance, or feelings toward interacting with supporters of different parties, in addition to commonly used like-dislike ratings of parties. We find that social distance differs from party like-dislike ratings in that respondents are less likely to report animosity toward outparty supporters. Second, we measure multiple party identification based on party support and closeness, and find that people commonly have not one, but many potential inparties. Finally, we build two individual-level AP measures and apply them using both like-dislike ratings and social distance scales. One of the measures is based on identifying a single inparty, while the other takes the possibility of multiple inparties into account. We find that choosing which type of attitude to measure is more consequential for the outcome than how partisanship is operationalized. Our results and discussion clarify relationships between AP and related constructs, and highlight the necessity to consider the political and social context when measuring AP and interpreting results.

Political theory has been historically rich with commentaries taking the form of utopias. The collection reviewed here revisits this genre through short stories using sci-fi projects as entry points. Written by 12 Palestinian writers, Palestine +100 poses the question of what utopia means for the colonized. The book offers crucial insights into how utopia, as a mode of political theorizing, could leave behind its Eurocentric parochialism and construct alternatives to it.

To increase understanding about the weak implementation of labour rights in global value chains, this paper examines processes of in-fact informalization that in Cambodia’s garment industry exclude workers from legal protection in a hidden yet effective manner. Informalization in contemporary global capitalism is often examined as driven by capital. This article broadens the analysis to how states and workers contribute to top-down and bottom-up processes of in-fact informalization, and emphasizes the role of workers’ collective organization. In Cambodia, subcontracting and temporary contracts prevent workers from collectively claiming their legal entitlements. In-fact informalization is promoted by the government as a strategy of indirect rule aimed at ensuring political power, and strengthened by the workers’ gendered needs and strategies of intergenerational wellbeing. Together, informal work and insecure lives discourage unionization, which further increases top-down and bottom-up informalization.

Biodiversity conservation and mining activities are increasingly overlapping throughout the world. While conservation has conventionally been seen as a strategy to oppose the negative environmental impacts of extractivism, the experiences of local communities especially in the Global South reveal similar dynamics in the ways in which mining and conservation actors seek to gain control over land and resources, often resulting in land grabbing. Furthermore, literature on neoliberal conservation has portrayed conservation as an increasingly prevalent strategy of capital accumulation. This study looks at the commodity frontiers of neoliberal conservation and mining – at the spectrum ranging from artisanal and small-scale mining to large-scale corporate mining – and focuses on the competing territorialisations at these heterogeneous ‘double’ frontiers. Analysed by means of an integrative literature review and illustrated with cases from across the Global South, this study asks just what institutional settings enable the mining and conservation frontiers to co-exist and what kinds of interactions can be expected at their intersections. The study finds three different types of double frontier interactions, competing, synergistic and co-ignorant, resulting alternatively from deepened cooperation between international mining and conservation actors, a fragmented state structure or legal pluralism at the local level. These findings provide a first attempt to create a theoretical framework for analysing the intersections of the expanding mining and conservation frontiers. They highlight the need for further empirical research to focus on double frontier contexts and particularly on the roles played by local actors between the frontiers in order to address, understand and manage the increasing competition between mining and conservation across the rural landscapes of the Global South.

In the German parliament, the Bundestag, floor time is a scarce resource and is allocated to MPs by leaders of their respective parliamentary party groups. Previous research indicates that highly salient plenary debates tend to be dominated by party leaders and other loyal frontbenchers. Plenary speeches can therefore offer only limited insights into party unity. Any MP can give a so-called ‘explanation of vote’ (EoVs) to justify their voting decision and/or express their point of view. These written statements provide a more accurate depiction of the range of viewpoints present within legislative parties. In order to assess the effect of party control on observed party unity and parliamentary contestation, discourse network analysis has been employed in this study to compare legislative speech with EoVs in debates on the Greek crisis between 2010 and 2015. Discourse network analysis combines content analysis with an actor-centred approach, and this is the first time this method has been used to study party control and (dis)unity. Bundestag debates on the Greek crisis present an interesting case study, as the issue became increasingly controversial over time, both in the public and the legislature. While this became evident in declining voting unity and individual-level mobilisation through EoVs, the extent to which gatekeeping impedes contestation on the plenary floor needs to be assessed. In terms of representation, it is important that European Union issues not only make it to the plenary agenda but that these debates also reflect the different viewpoints of MPs.

Can the rise of nationalist-authoritarian populism be explained in terms of neoliberalism and its effects? The first half of this paper is about conceptual underlabouring: in spite of significant overlap, there are relatively clear demarcation criteria for identifying neoliberalism and nationalist-authoritarian populism as distinct entities. Neoliberalism has succeeded in transforming social contexts through agency, practices and institutions, with far-reaching effects. The prevailing economic and social policies have also had various causal effects such as rising inequalities, progressively more insecure terms of employment, and recurring economic crises. I argue that these have led to discontent with globalization and various political responses, including those of nationalist and authoritarian populisms. Finally, by juxtaposing constitutive and causal explanations, and by stressing the history of national-authoritarian populism, I raise questions about geo-historical specificity of different formations. The standard Karl Polanyian interpretation of Trump, Brexit and such like phenomena is misleading, yet a partial historical analogy especially to the interwar era populism is valid if understood in a subtle, processual, and sufficiently contextual way. The Polanyi-inspired historical analogy can be explored further. While the 19th and 20th century working class movement emerged from a variety of socio-economic conditions, socialists who believed in its world-historical role actively made it. Since the 1970s the working class has been largely unmade both as a result of impersonal processes and deliberate attempts to undermine it. Only a learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency for the 21st century.

The Gulag Archipelago has been treated consistently as a conservative indictment of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. When subsumed into his later writings, this perception has reinforced amongst progressives an enduring portrait of Solzhenitsyn-the-man as a backward-looking anti-modernist and reactionary. I advocate a return to the text itself in isolation from Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, and in a manner more cognizant of the political practices latent in its prose. In its style and structure, certain specific techniques can be found where the search for formal methodology has left previous commentators on the Left disappointed. The place of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus in the history of political thought is here reassessed on the basis of its style, pointing to its potential contribution to critical theory and to its relevance for critical social analysis today.

The conservativeness of traditional scientific methods, which nevertheless still tend to dominate much of the (social) sustainability sciences, is challenged by technological progress when untested tools of research are proposed as innovative scientific methods. This is the case of online platforms. The knowledge creation process in the digital era, including forms of research communication, can be profoundly different from traditional research methods. We already know how digital tools may influence the performance of research methods, mainly by maximizing the efficiency of data collection and elaboration. However, the original and collaborative practices in which they can develop, as well as their possibilities towards more democratic and inclusive participation processes, remain an unexplored domain. This chapter is an attempt to include digital technologies, and particularly the case of online participatory platforms based on geographic information systems (GIS), in the array of creative and visual research methods.We discuss software packages and current online approaches, such as web apps and native apps (Klettner & Huang, 2011, Scholte et al., 2018). The exploration of the innovative opportunities offered by digital tools starts with a concise review of their application from an historical perspective and its progression until recent times. The review focuses mostly on the options that digital platforms offer to involve citizens in the co-creation of research studies by enabling peer-to-peer environments that may inspire democratic discussions. The adoption of different types of online platforms is then discussed, not only presenting their virtues but also their downsides. This takes the form of an open discussion between the two authors, informed by each critically reflecting on their first-hand practical experiences in adopting digital tools in their research.We are entering a new era, in which access to big data—through platforms using GIS—provides resources and power to bring to the table the silent majority that is often overlooked in decision-making processes. The many possibilities offered by this unprecedented access to information are yet to be tested. Whether digital platforms will turn out to be a solution for improving the inclusiveness of research studies or not will likely depend on the consciousness and motivations of the designers and developers of these tools.

Unsustainable extraction of natural resources has come under increasing criticism since the 2000s, as global commodity prices have risen, and new waves of land grabbing and investing have put resource politics in the limelight of global development. The concept of extractivism has been gaining scholarly and policy relevance and is becoming more widely used as an organizing concept to explore a range of unsustainable practices. The study of extractivism and its impacts extends to the deeper historical and structural features that underlie unsustainable practices, including economic models and ideologies. The concept of extractivism is useful for highlighting the deeper and systemic roots of unsustainability. The phenomena surrounding resistance to extractivism are highly useful for understanding the often-overlooked struggles of local communities. It is through such local struggles that communities may pursue more sustainable land-use practices, and more just socio-ecological conditions. This resistance often involves a deep critique and rethinking of the ways of understanding and conceptualizing nature, through which alternatives to extractivism, as a basis for sustainability, can be developed.

This article studies how a technocratic populist can visually perform the authenticity and connection to ‘the low’ that is key to a populist performance while also maintaining the performance of expertise that is central to technocratic populist success. It relies on the case study of Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and uses Facebook data from his profile in March and September–October 2020, the two peak moments of the crisis in the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. After offering a timeline of the Czech COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, it applies a dramaturgical analysis to four representative photos from Babiš’ Facebook page. It finds that Babiš was able to simultaneously articulate both expertise and authenticity, thereby both creating a connection to ‘the people’ while also articulating himself as an expert capable of handling the pandemic. He articulated expertise through a technocratic bodily performance, presenting himself as a cosmopolitan leader with international symbols of power like neutral-colored suits and elegant surroundings. At the same time, he also articulated himself as an authentic politician by showing his Facebook followers backstage imagery like a disorganized table and by showing himself as a busy man and an exceptionally hard worker. By illuminating the visual performance of technocratic populism, it offers insight into how technocratic populists constitute the expertise that their success rests on and that can also pose a threat to democratic societies, especially in a time of crisis.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) seek to strengthen democracy by assisting voters in voting-related decision-making. VAAs have become popular tools across many European democracies and their usage has been linked to real life electoral consequences. As VAA usage has become more prominent, this has also sparked research interest toward VAA design. However, most of the VAA design research has been conducted on party-based VAAs, whereas candidate-based VAAs that are in use in countries such as Finland, Denmark and Switzerland have been largely ignored. Moreover, research on overall VAA designs, in comparison to individual VAA design elements, is non-existent. This article discusses interdependencies of VAA design choices and proposes overall VAA designs that can improve existing Finnish candidate-based VAA designs, encouraging Finnish VAA developers to update their designs. Future research should develop and test the suggested designs, as more research on the topic is needed, especially regarding VAA user experiences.

This contribution will focus on the politics of scales: traditionally conceived, by the positivist science, as hierarchical relational levels that vary from the dimension of the human body to the global, they are studied by post structural interpretations in terms of multiscalarity, processual rescaling, ideological constructions, and contextual pathways for democratic, just and sustainable transformations. This chapter focuses on two cases: a) on rescaling strategies played by indigenous organizations in Ecuador in relation to the central powers, to affirm the plurinational identity of the state; and b) on standard scales in natural conservation and creation of a natural park and kinship scale based on the notion of ancestral lands, tanindrazana, of the Tsimihety, main ethnic group in rural Northeast Madagascar. Politics of scales informs sustainability science to focus carefully on peoples’ institutions, territories, and territorialities as contingent levels of power interactions.

The Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new geologic era in which humans are held to be a defining agent of planetary history. Largely the effect of fossil fuel use in industrial societies, this periodization has itself generated a minor academic industry of publications and theoretical formulations that have alternately challenged and reinforced disciplinary perspectives. In light of this, this chapter argues for a conjunctural approach to the Anthropocene concept, one that focuses on understanding its ‘meaning’ in relation to the political, geographical, ecological, economic, and institutional contexts where it is deployed. It draws on two examples, one from an ‘ecomodernist’ institute located in California, another from the indigenous Kichwa people of Ecuador.

Executive duties have long been described as becoming more intensive and demanding. One contributing factor is a perceived increase in the complexity of the operating environment. A high level of physical fitness has been suggested to support responses to those demands. This study aims to contribute to the topic by producing a holistic view informed by asking how physically active executive-level leaders perceive the impact (whether positive or negative) of managerial athleticism on the level of the individual, organization, and society. Twenty physically active high-level leaders were interviewed for the study. The sample was almost equally split by gender, represented a diverse range of societal sectors, and engaged in many different forms of exercise. The results support previous research, however, this study provides a more nuanced view of the topic. Although the interviewees saw many good aspects of physical exercise, such as providing physical, affective, cognitive, and social resources, they were also able to think critically about their personal relationship with exercising and their attitudes toward others taking physical exercise. The study highlights the role of balancing the harmonious and obsessive aspects of the relationship with exercising. Instead of a disproportionate study of extreme cases, we conclude that it would be worthwhile studying leaders with a harmonious relationship with exercise to ensure results do not become biased and physically active leaders are not stereotyped.

The crisis of the Left has many reasons and causes, some of which are understandable in terms of classical rhetoric: ethos, pathos and logos. Yet this crisis has real causes not reducible to language and rhetoric alone. Attempts at “modernization” of social democracy have eroded hope, while the supposed Soviet legacy has continued to haunt the more “radical” Left movements and parties. Over time, collective memory shifts and political audience changes. The two recently most-successful leftist parties have emerged from social movements: Syriza and Podemos have consciously adopted left-wing populist stances. A problem is that the story of “people versus the dominant elite” loses part of its emotional appeal if the representatives of the “people” appear to be enmeshed with “elite” practices either in one’s own country or elsewhere. The fate of Syriza reveals also how difficult it is to make even a moderate and cautious turn toward the Left, unless there is a broader European or worldwide movement behind it. It is here further argued that there is no automatic or mechanical Polanyian “double movement”. Rather, world history depends also on agency. The discrepancy between territorial states and global capital is an obstacle that can be best overcome by globalizing democratic-socialist politics. It is argued that far from being exhausted as a project or in terms of pathos, a grand task awaits the Left. Social freedom can be increased. Obstacles can be removed. Existing global political economy contradictions and global problems can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and by the building of more adequate common institutions. An experimentalist leftist vision can inspire hope and optimism about our future possibilities.

The idea that the EU should place a carbon price on certain imports from less climate-ambitious countries implies a recognition that not only climate change itself but also the implementation of climate measures is a global problem. The European scale does not ensure structured coherence among the economy, political organization, and rational responses to salient problems. We argue that there is an alternative: a global Keynesian GGGT. While the tax relies on market mechanism for some of its effects, it is also market disruptive and meant to open up a space for global public policy. Our preliminary proposal is to establish a new, democratically organised but inclusive global organization. Moreover, we have argued that building a global tax system is a process. From a global Keynesian perspective, a border levy is defendable as a part of an increasingly inclusive global system – especially if that system is widely seen as vital for the future of the life systems on Earth.

This chapter addresses military-patriotic education in Russia. The Russian state pays increasing attention to the military-patriotic upbringing of children and youth, hoping to achieve a larger draft pool and patriotic citizens. In 2015, Ûnarmiâ was founded to unite the country’s fragmented military-patriotic youth organizations. The movement’s aim was to operate in every school by 2020. By deconstructing the hegemonic discourse of military-patriotic education, I analyse the linguistic ways in which the legitimization of Ûnarmiâ has been constructed. Discourses of heroism, masculinity, a beneficial and fun hobby, citizen-soldier and military traditionalism include a variety of key strategies of legitimization for influencing audiences. Discourses suggest that Ûnarmiâ’s purpose is to raise patriotic citizens, who support the prevailing regime and contribute to solving the demographic crisis by repeating ‘traditional’ gender roles, rather than preparing young people for war. Keywords: military-patriotic education, Ûnarmiâ, Russia, patriotism, militarism

This chapter explores populism in Nordic countries where there is a long tradition of heterogeneous, populist parties with incompatible political ideologies transforming over decades. Populist parties have emerged as a reaction to dominant thinking in each of the political contexts. Theoretically, generating a typology between populist parties, people divide populist parties into mainstream and fringe populist parties. Mainstream populists seek to take over political space as a whole from a central position in the core of politics, as one of the larger and often traditional parties. Fringe populist parties and movements would challenge all the other parties from a supposed outside. Consensus culture in politics is present in all Nordic countries but political systems differ. Nordic populist parties have experienced waves of popularity related to different grievances and protests: from elitism in the 1960s to taxes in the 1970s–1980s and to immigration from the 1980s and onward.

For decades, the concept of “structural reform” has been dominant in the economic policy discourse of the EU and most of its member states, from Greece to Finland. The term gets its meaning mainly from neoclassical economic theory, though there are also Schumpeterian and other elements. An analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept (which emerged in the 1980s and was spread through the Bretton Woods institutions and the OECD) reveals conceptual and theoretical ambiguities and factual weaknesses. While many of these weaknesses are related to unrealistic assumptions, I argue further that the realisticness of particular assumptions is different from the realism of the approach and relevance of the problematic. Second, to explore the limitations of the concept in its current meaning, I outline a brief genealogy of the concept of structure in social sciences and then juxtapose the economistic concept of structure with that of realist social theory. Third, I explore the implications of this deeper ontological conception of structure to the meaning and nature of possible structural reforms. Fourth, I give a few examples of alternative structural reforms to make my points more concrete. The envisioned programme of structural changes would amount to reversing the current EU strategy for growth. In the end, I summarise the overall argument.

Candidate endorsements affect the likelihood that people vote for a candidate since they reduce the efforts devoted to vote choices. However, the effects of endorsements from different sources remain under-explored. Furthermore, the effects of endorsements are believed to vary with the level of political sophistication, as voters with low sophistication are more reliant on such shortcuts, but it is unclear whether these differences are similar for different sources. We study the effects of endorsements from three different sources – family and close friends, networks on social media and Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) – on candidate favorability. We do so with a choice-based conjoint experiment embedded in a survey from Finland (n = 1021), where we also examine differences in effects across political sophistication (political interest, frequency of political discussions, internal political efficacy, party identification, and voting in the last parliamentary election). The results show that endorsements from VAAs and family and friends have positive effects while social media networks do not. We do not find systematic differences in effects across levels of political sophistication no matter how we operationalize it. This shows that it is important to consider the source of an endorsement to appreciate the effect, no matter who is the recipient.

Diaconal and social workers spend their days implementing social policy and exercising discretional power while being regularly exposed to social inequalities. As an occupational group, they are heavily influenced by official government decisions, which might be expected to shape their political preferences. Our analyses, based on the Street-Level Bureaucrats Survey 2011 (n = 1,237) and the Finnish National Election Study 2011 (n = 1,298) reveal that more than half of diaconal workers voted for conservative centrist parties – the Christian Democrats and the Centre Party – in the 2011 parliamentary elections, whereas two-thirds of social workers supported leftist or green parties. The work context – the municipality/parish, length of work experience, and primary work duties – also influenced voting behavior. The professional identities and work environments of diaconal and social workers thus differentiate them not only from other members of the same social class, but also from each other in terms of partisanship.

Online deliberation research has recently developed automated indicators to assess the deliberative quality of much user-generated online data. While most previous studies have developed indicators based on content analysis and network analysis, time-series data and associated methods have been studied less thoroughly. This article contributes to the literature by proposing indicators based on a combination of network analysis and time-series analysis, arguing that it will help monitor how online deliberation evolves. Based on Habermasian deliberative criteria, we develop six throughput indicators and demonstrate their applications in the OmaStadi participatory budgeting project in Helsinki, Finland. The study results show that these indicators consist of intuitive figures and visualizations that will facilitate collective intelligence on ongoing processes and ways to solve problems promptly.

The concept of “generation” constitutes a useful tool to understand the world of politics. Trends in political behavior typical for the youngest generation are indicative for future development. In a wider perspective, large differences between generations also reveal potential for intergenerational conflict and a shift in the entire political paradigm. Four important topics need to be addressed in order to properly understand the body of research studying specifics of political behavior across generations and the use of generation as an analytical tool: (a) conceptual definition of generation, (b) its distinction from other time-related concepts, (c) methodological challenges in applying the time-related factors in research, and (d) understanding the wider implications of these factors for individuals’ political behavior which has already been identified in the scholarship. A political generation is formed among cohorts who experience the same event(s) during their formative years and become permanently influenced by them. Therefore, members of the same generation share similar socialization experiences which create a sense of group belonging and shape the attitudes and behavior throughout their lives. This definition of political generation is distinctive among the three time-related factors—age, period, and cohort—each of which has a well-grounded and distinctive theoretical underpinning. However, a truly insightful examination of the time-related development in political engagement needs to utilize hybrid models that interact with age and period or cohort and period. This imposes a challenge known as identification problem—age (years since birth), period (year), and cohort (year of birth) are perfect linear functions of each other and therefore conventional statistical techniques cannot disentangle their effects. Despite extraordinary effort and outstanding ideas, this issue has not been resolved yet in a fully reliable and hence satisfactory manner. Regardless of methodological issues, the literature is already able to provide important findings resulting from cohort analysis of political engagement. This scholarship includes two major streams: The first focuses on voter turnout, exploring whether nonvoting among the youngest generation is a main reason for the turnout decline in contemporary democracies. The second stream examines the generational differences in political engagement and concludes that low electoral participation among the youngest generation may be explained by young people being more engaged with noninstitutionalized forms of political participation (e.g., occupations, petitions, protests, and online activism).

This chapter addresses scientific realism. After the heyday of empiricism in the interwar period and its immediate aftermath, many critical reactions to empiricism seemed to suggest scientific realism. It was widely agreed that scientific theories make references to things that cannot be directly observed (or at least seen), and thus emerged the issue of the status of non-observables. As scientific realism became increasingly dominant, new philosophical stances such as Bas C. van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism were often defined in opposition to it. Van Fraassen understands scientific realism as a claim that science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. More in line with established forms of scientific realism, Ilkka Niiniluoto talks about verisimilitude, or truth-likeness. This concept is supposed to avoid the consequences of claiming to have access to the truth itself. The chapter then considers how the social sciences seem to pose difficulties for scientific realism.

This chapter examines approaches to disaster response critically. It compares ‘owner-driven’ and ‘community-ownership’ approaches to recovery policy taken by two different cities in the Indian state of Gujarat following the devastating 2001 Gujarat earthquake. Each model recognizes a different compositional context of agents, temporalities, and effects, thus producing different outcomes in the lives of individuals and communities.

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This chapter examines the closest Finnish analogy to the French function of the prefect. In Finland, since 2010, this function has been vested in the institution of the State Regional Administrative Agency (SRAA, aluehallintovirasto, ‘AVI’). There are six SRAAs, each headed by a Chief Director (ylijohtaja) nominated by the government. The study had four main findings. First, despite ambiguity in institutional terminology, classifications, boundaries and identities concerning the SRAA, one can discern few true functional or structural deficiencies. Second, the SRAA is a hybrid between an institution of its own and a territorial representative of either government ministries or government agencies, to which is related the fact that each SRAA has both responsibilities concerning its territory and nationwide responsibilities. Third, tensions between performance and institutional legitimation prevail in the institution of the SRAA, but again without serious deficiencies. Fourth, the 2010 substitution of the SRAA for the former Province comprised a radical institutional change. The 2015–2019 Finnish government intended to abolish the SRAAs, but the subsequent government abandoned that reform, and ultimately by mid-2020 it became clear that the institution of the SRAA was here to stay after all.

This paper tries to shed a different light onto the (changing) state-society relations in Uzbekistan, using a theoretical framework offered by Joel Migdal (2001) and looking into both the “image” and “practices” of state. Using the example of the public councils (Jamoatchilik kengashlari) and President’s reception houses (Prezident qabulxonalari) in Uzbekistan that have been initiated since 2016, I will look into the cases of reforms, aimed at greater public participation and oversight over state administration, and improving the responsiveness of public bodies to citizen demands. I will analyse if/how new structures based on a new ideology of administrative change and the old culture converged in the transition processes; and how these influence the day-to-day lives of street-level bureaucrats.

As the COVID-19 pandemic propagates throughout the world, speculations have begun of the post-pandemic world. In this article, I argue that the world after COVID-19 will be a different and difficult one, with unprecedented economic hardships and rampant social anxieties becoming the new normal. However, the pandemic also offers a chance to reflect and to revise our course, and to come up with an alternative that will be just and fair for the many. I begin the article by offering an assessment of COVID-19’s impact on global power structures and move on to elaborate its possible implications on political processes, particularly on the instruments of democracy and the rule of law. Drawing from various experiences reported during the pandemic, I argue that the post-pandemic world will be characterized by populism, nationalism, intensified citizen surveillance, and curtailed and compromised individual liberties. The pandemic will also inflict severe damage to globalization, free trade, multilateralism, and development cooperation. I conclude the article by arguing that most of the problems witnessed during this crisis, however, are systemic, and caused by dysfunctional neoliberal corporate capitalism. In that sense, if there is a political mandate of this crisis – that is to find an alternative to the obsolete and oppressive neoliberal corporate capitalism which has served a few and failed the many.

Development consulting companies are pivotal actors in bilateral projects, yet they are largely invisible in policy documents, and little researched. Their business model is a combination of ‘doing good’ and profit. This article examines the history, business logics and working relationships of consulting companies in development cooperation, taking the case of Finland. It asks ‘Why are consultancy companies needed in development cooperation?’ Their relationship with donors appears to represent a principal–agent relationship, yet they often share the donor’s ethos, and even exchange staff. The dramatic decrease in technical assistance budgets over recent years, along with increasing bureaucracy, has caused profits to diminish and many companies have disappeared, taking institutional memory with them. However, if the donors wish to assert some policy guidance and have contact with work on the ground in developing countries, there is a need for technical assistance via consulting companies.

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations. In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations.

Global university rankings have emerged as a benchmark of institutional success, setting standards for higher education policymaking and institutional practices. Nevertheless, only a marginal share of higher education institutions (HEI) are in a realistic position to be ranked as a ‘world-class’ institutions. In the European context, the global rankings have been used to highlight a performance gap between European and North American institutions. Here the focus has been on the HEIs in the top-100 positions, causing concerns over European higher education. This has also become a marker of world-class university. We analyze the strategies of 27 Northern European universities in different tiers to learn how they have adjusted to the reality of ranking. We conclude that the references to global rankings have increased between 2014 and 2018. At the same time, the references to rankings have become more implicit in nature. Nevertheless, we find that the discourse of global comparison and excellence has become more common in the strategies. There are also emerging references to the regional role of universities, which are apparent in the strategies of universities that are clearly outside the top-100 ranked institutions. However, this is also a reflection of the discourse of world-class university.

The proliferation of Airbnb listings has been studied in major tourist cities, but much less is known about the phenomenon in Nordic cities. In this paper we have examined the situation in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, which has been largely unexplored in the research literature. Using our situated knowledge as an entry point, this study is based on geostatistical analysis, qualitative analysis of Airbnb listings, thematic conversations with experts and analysis of public discourses through media, to illustrate how Airbnb listings are distributed within the city and what perceptions and responses this phenomenon is generating. In the study, we challenge the public narrative that portrays short-term renting of homes in Helsinki as a form of sharing economy, as opposed to more destructive developments in major European tourist cities.